The ironic murder of serial killers
Serial killer Robert “Willie” Pickton died (on 31 May) 12 days after being attacked by another inmate in a high-security jail.
The 74-year-old is not the first serial killer to be murdered in prison and he won’t be the last.
But why does such an ending to his story give us such a sense of satisfaction?
Pickton (pictured above) was put in a medically-induced coma after being “speared” in the head with a broken broom handle at Port Cartier, a prison in Canada’s Quebec province. But he later died after complications set in.
His alleged killer Martin “Spike” Charest is understood to have a history of assaulting fellow inmates.
Pickton was jailed for life in December 2007 for six murders but is believed to have killed at least 49 women, mostly homeless drug addicts and sex workers from Vancouver’s notorious Eastside district.
He was dubbed “Canada’s pig farm killer” because Pickton disposed of his victims’ bodies on his farm in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia.
Pigs are notoriously indiscriminate eaters and Pickton is not the first killer to have used them to dispose of a body.
In 1969 Muriel McKay, 55, was mistakenly kidnapped by brothers Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein and held for a £1m ransom.
They thought she was newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s then wife.
After finding out the truth they killed her and fed her body to pigs on their farm in Hertfordshire.
Arthur Hosein died in prison in 2009 but his brother - who was deported back to his native Trinidad after serving his sentence - recently assisted the police, who last month resumed a search of the farm near Bishop’s Stortford in a bid to find remains of Mrs McKay.
Pickton - who farmed on a much bigger scale than the Hoseins - and his brother Dave used to hold wild sex parties on their property, which were attended by Hells Angels and other bikers.
They even set up a non-profit trust, the Piggy Palace Good Times Society, and sold tickets openly, advertising in local papers.
But in February 2002, while executing a search warrant for illegal firearms, the police discovered personal items belonging to women who had been missing for years.
Pickton had been killing women since 1983, usually after luring them back to the farm from Vancouver after offering them money and drugs.
The Eastside of downtown Vancouver was and still is notorious for its large homeless population, most of whom have alcohol or drug addictions.
Many homeless folk on the Eastside were prepared to sell sex for money or drugs and they did not stop even when it became apparent, in the late 1990s, that women were going missing and there was probably a serial killer on the loose.
Pickton had been charged with the attempted murder of a sex worker in 1997 but the case was later dropped.
After his arrest in 2002 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police - better known as The Mounties - planted an undercover officer in his cell, posing as a cellmate.
A secret video camera was put in the cell and Pickton was heard telling his ‘cellmate’: “I have no life. Now they’re trying to bury me. Now the farm buries me."
“I’m screwed, tattooed, nailed to the cross, and now I’m a mass murderer,” he added.
In 2007 Pickton was convicted of the murder of Marnie Frey, Sereena Abotsway, Andrea Joesbury, Mona Wilson, Brenda Wolfe and Georgina Papin.
At the sentencing hearing Marnie Frey’s mother Lynn read out a statement from Marnie’s daughter Brittney, who was 15 at the time.
Brittney wrote: “Mr Pickton, why did you do that? When you took her from me, it was like ripping out my heart.”
Pickton had been due to face trial for a further 20 murders but the prosecution dropped the charges because, even if convicted, he could not serve a longer sentence.
The Canadian is not the first serial killer to have become a murder victim themselves behind bars.
In February 1992 Jeffrey Dahmer - convicted of murdering and dismembering 15 young men, mainly gay and black, in Milwaukee - was jailed for life with no possibility of parole.
The trial - at which the only issue was whether Dahmer (pictured above) was mad or bad - heard some of the most gruesome evidence ever heard in a US courtroom.
After the jury ruled he was sane and he was given his sentence, Dahmer calmly read a statement to the courtroom, in which he said: "I never wanted freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself. I knew I was sick or evil or both.”
Just over two years later - on the morning of 28 November 1994 - Dahmer got what he wanted.
Dahmer was cleaning the toilets on a wing at Columbia Correctional Institution with wife-killer Jesse Anderson, 37, and 25-year-old Christopher Scarver.
They were not being supervised by any prison officer.
Scarver would later claim he was poked in the back as he worked.
“I turned around and he and Jesse were kind of laughing under their breath. I looked right into their eyes, and I couldn't tell which had done it," added Scarver, who promptly picked up an iron bar and beat both of them to death.
Scarver (pictured above) was serving a life sentence for murder after he killed a man during a robbery in 1990 at the Wisconsin Conservation Corps, which he bore a grudge against after being overlooked for a job.
Scarver - who was black - denied he had specifically targeted Dahmer for his crimes, which were mainly against African-American men.
But he said he disliked him and felt he did not show contrition for his crimes.
Scarver told the New York Post, in an interview years later: “He crossed the line with some people — prisoners, prison staff. Some people who are in prison are repentant — but he was not one of them."
In Dahmer’s will he specified that he should not have a funeral or memorial service of any kind.
Another serial killer who few mourned when he was found dead in his cell was Albert De Salvo, the Boston Strangler.
Between 1962 and 1964, he sexually assaulted and asphyxiated 13 women in the city.
He was, with the possible exception of the Zodiac Killer, the most notorious serial killer of the 1960s and his infamy was boosted by the 1968 film in which Tony Curtis played De Salvo.
On November 27, 1973, De Salvo (pictured above) was found dead in his cell at while Walpole state prison in Massachusetts.
He had been stabbed to death, although the killer was never found.
It was later claimed the motive for his murder was because he was under-cutting other prison drug dealers by selling amphetamines at a lower price.
Although De Salvo - as famously portrayed by Curtis in the movie - had confessed, he recanted shortly before his death and for years conspiracy theorists insisted he was an innocent man.
Those claims quietened down in 2013 when a DNA test linked De Salvo “with 99.9% certainty” to the Boston Strangler’s last victim, 19-year-old Mary Sullivan.
The DeSalvo family had always refused to co-operate with the police but a detective followed Albert’s nephew Tim to a construction site where he worked and retrived a bottle of water from which he had drank.
A familial DNA test proved his uncle had been the serial killer.
There have been several other serial killers murdered in prison - including Donald Leroy Evans, Billy Chemirmir.
Evans - who may have killed more than 70 people in 20 states - was stabbed to death in the shower in 1999 while on Death Row at the Mississippi state penitentiary.
Chemirmir - a Kenyan-born serial killer who murdered 22 elderly women in the Dallas area between 2016 and 2018 - is believed to have been slain by his cellmate, 39-year-old Wyatt Busby, on September 19 last year.
Busby, who has yet to face trial for Chemirmir’s death, was apparently enraged by sexual comments the serial killer made about his cellmate's children.
One of the most infamous serial killers of them all, Peter Sutcliffe, survived an attack.
In 1997 a man called Ian Kay stabbed the Yorkshire Ripper in the eye with a pen at Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security psychiatric unit where Sutcliffe spent most of his sentence.
Sutcliffe lost the sight in one eye.
Other serial killers have taken their own lives, including Dr Harold Shipman and Fred West.
I was on duty in the office of the Gloucester Citizen on New Year’s Day 1995 when news came in - on Ceefax, if anyone remembers that - of West’s death in Birmingham’s Winson Green prison, where he was being held on remand.
Two other prison killings which perhaps deserve brief mention are that of Leslie “Catweasel” Bailey and Richard Huckle.
On 7 October 1993 Bailey - a notorious paedophile who was serving life sentences for killing three boys, Jason Swift, 14, Mark Tildesley, 7, and six-year-old Barry Lewis - was strangled in his cell in Whitemoor prison in Cambridgeshire.
Bailey’s killers, Michael Cain and John Brooks, were themselves both murderous paedophiles.
Bailey, Cain and Brooks were all Rule 43 prisoners.
Rule 43 is the term used for those inmates who need to be isolated for their own safety and it includes paedophiles - “nonces” in prison parlance - as well as grasses and a tiny group of former police or prison officers who are in custody.
Another Rule 43 prisoner was Richard Huckle, 33, who was serving 22 life sentences for the horrific sexual abuse of up to 200 children in Malaysia.
In October 2019 Huckle (pictured above) was subjected to a truly monstrous attack by Paul Fitzgerald in Full Sutton prison in North Yorkshire.
In a 78 minute period - during which unaware prison staff did not intervene - Fitzgerald, 30, went into Huckle’s cell, tied him up, raped him, assaulted him with various weapons before finally strangling him with an electric cord.
It later emerged Fitzgerald had told prison officers of his “extremely violent fantasies” which included torture and cannibalism.
Last month a report was published by the Prisons & Probation Ombudsman into Huckle’s death.
The report stated of Huckle: “During his time in prison, he was sometimes the victim of violence and bullying and some prison staff told us that the high-profile nature of his offence might have made him more of a ‘target’ for assault.”
Serial killers and high profile paedophiles will always be vulnerable in prison.
Most of us care not a jot whether they suffer a horrific death like Huckle, or die after decades behind bars, as long as they cannot harm anyone else.
Pickton, at 74, would not have been much of a threat even if he had been released.
But the families of his victims may have gained some solace from the belief that he probably suffered fear and agony during the attack in that Quebec prison, thousands of miles from Vancouver.
Life has not changed a great deal on Vancouver’s Eastside since Pickton was arrested in 2002.
On the city of Vancouver’s website they admit: “In recent years, the Downtown Eastside has struggled with many complex challenges including drug use, crime, homelessness, housing issues, unemployment, and loss of businesses in the community.”
It goes on to say that a “Downtown Eastside community plan” was completed in 2014.
But April, a Vancouver resident, says the situation on the ground has actually got worse since she first arrived in the city in 2014.
She said most people in Vancouver feel “hopeless, helpless and ashamed” about the situation in the Downtown Eastside and were empathetic, realising it only took a few bad strokes of fortune for someone to become homeless, or “unhoused”.
April said there was speculation in the city that other parts of Canada - like Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan - were paying for their homeless and drug addicts to be transported to Vancouver.
In March 2023 the new Mayor of Vancouver, Ken Sim, said: “The challenges we see in the Downtown Eastside are real and significant— today marks an important step forward. I know that by working together, we will secure quality housing for our city’s most vulnerable residents and deliver a better future for the Downtown Eastside.”
Only time will tell.